


welcome to dogtown, where lions tell tales

by civilorange



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F, Galactic Conspiracy, Gen, Space!Knight, Space!PIrate, i'm the worst with tags, oh my
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-27
Updated: 2017-04-27
Packaged: 2018-10-24 14:40:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10743762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/civilorange/pseuds/civilorange
Summary: It’s hard to watch a world burn—even harder when its home.Krypton doesn’t go anywhere, it isn’t consumed by hellish fire, or blown into the black of space—no, it sits there and exists.Even if she can’t recognize it anymore.Somehow that’s worse.//or; space!knights, space!pirates, galactic conspiracies, oh my.





	welcome to dogtown, where lions tell tales

**Author's Note:**

> So, this has been sitting in my folders for a while now, and I've decided to just put it out there. I could never decide if I was happy with it or not, so I'm just saying screw it and putting it out into the world. This is alternate universe, as you can probably guess. The original idea was very different, but somehow there was a hook and this came out of it. I don't know if ya'll are as thrilled with the idea of space!knights and space!pirates as I am. But yeah, let me know what you think of this nonsense. It's pretty ridiculous.

**China, Greater-port of Qingdao. March 12 th, 2360**.

It’s hard to watch a world burn—even harder when its _home_.

Krypton doesn’t go anywhere, it isn’t consumed by hellish fire, or blown into the black of space—no, it sits there and _exists_.

Even if she can’t recognize it anymore.

Somehow that’s worse.

The gold and white banners of El have been torn down, the towering monuments to war heroes pulled to the ground with lengths of recoil-rope—whole cities bristling blue-white with artificial fire.

The news coverage doesn’t miss anything—a pale blue woman with turquois hair from the chamber floor of Earth’s senate recites numbers as if they have no meaning. 103,654,013 confirmed dead, 47,211,980 missing.

“Today,” the speaker says, finally blinking away the distance to actually look at the camera. “Argo City burns.”

The holoLens from the aft window of some Colonial ship refocuses and there’s the distinct arc of small objects falling to the planet—Kryptonian Knights in heat tempered steel suits blasting through the atmosphere with hope in their chests that not everything is lost. That there is still something to conquer, something to regain—but she knows there’s armaments waiting for them. Electromagnetic pulses that’ll throw off their navigation and toss them carelessly into the sides of mountains, or to the bottom of Krypton’s crimson oceans where they’ll suffocate in their steel armor turned prison cells.

The live footage of Daxam’s armada hanging in Krypton’s lower orbit changes to a recording from only a few hours earlier—outdated dreadnaughts clamber through the black of space lobbing green ringed munitions at Krypton’s largest moon— _Urvish_ —it’s most inhabited satellite. Nuclear warfare had been regulated nearly sixty years prior—only the smallest of warheads allowed in ship to ship combat—but this was no battle being had. The bombs cracked like fissured atoms against the ground, creating craters miles wide and clouds of noxious green smoke that block out even the strongest of Rao’s light.

It takes only forty minutes for _Urvish_ to be obliterated—and entire moon reduced to clambering ash, brittle death, and toxic air. It hangs there in the live footage, a graveyard to over one-hundred million Kryptonians, the first—and worst—casualties of this slaughter. A silent carcass that used to be home to Krypton’s wealthiest families; distant relatives to the royal family that didn’t want anything more than their pedigree earned titles and better yachts than the sprawling compounds beside them—but all of that’s gone now.

Leaving in its place smoking craters and gray air—the satellite suddenly uninhabitable for at least three generations.

“This just in,” the bland everyEarth news castor says while pressing a finger to the implant in front of her ear. The flash of gold in her irises say she’s casting through a log on her injected eye implants, before they flash and the holoScreen fills with a video feed. “Krypton’s sovereign has been taken into custody by Daxam lancers, word from the ground says they are preforming a trial.”

The shaky recording bobbles and sways, but the figures are clear. Alura au El—Sovereign of Krypton, and all her Colonial planets—is pushed forward by a faceless combatant, everything about them shrouded in metal and glowing electronics. Bright yellow where eyes should be, an outrageously curved blade guiding the regal woman to the tops of Krypton’s coliseum. She’s dwarfed by the armored figures, whole heads shorter, whole stones lighter—but that doesn’t register.

Not on her face, not in her posture.

The Sovereign’s lips move, but no sound comes through—cool lunar eyes and a pressed frown. She isn’t broad, she isn’t firm and unmoving—lithe and willowy the ruler doesn’t balk when her knees are hit with the flat of a pilfered pulseCarver. The weapon carried only by Kryptonian Knights—it’s lax and nearly useless in the hands of the conquering Daxamite, but it’s a symbol of Krypton’s ruin, a symbol of what was lost this day.

“How do you plead to your crimes?” A booming voice sounds from somewhere in a mess of bodies, there’s the drumming of fists on pulseShields and armored chests. _Thump_ , _thump_. Alura looks on with whole eyes filled with crumbling worlds—even from thousands of lightyears away, it’s impossible not to see how the end must taste. Bitter ash, and soiled air.

Watching in silent horror from a diner across the galaxy seems wrong, but she can’t help being here— _she can’t stop being here_ , even if she wishes to every deity of her childhood that she wasn’t.

“I cannot plead to something that is nothing but imagined,” she hears—even through the rickety 4th generation holoScreen—how the imperial woman’s voice does not stammer, does not hitch. The pulseCarver tucked up under her chin, the vibrating metal bringing blood forth with the barest of touches—in a knight’s hand they are weapons of death and honor, in this invader’s hand it’s nothing but a sharp edge.

She knows how quiet it can be on starships; how the sound ripples out, and out, _and_ _out_ , until it's lost in the oblivion waiting at the edges of space. Sailors speak of the starless black with a reverence, the places where the constellations go dim and the only light being that of passing ships. She knows that the battle tested Kryptonians on those ships ache with the black. That they believe themselves light and airy with stardust, bright and true with constellations.

Heaven sent warriors with righteousness in their blood, and merit in their marrow.

But she also knows a losing battle when she sees it; the way large destroyers rumble and rattle, spitting out warheads half the size of capital class scouting ships.

“This is insane,” a voice says to her side; a boy with a waspish face and freckles like leopard spots across his cheeks. She knows he isn't the standard of beauty here, but the pattern pulls her eyes. A little bit of the night sky on the bridge of his nose. He’s the youngest one—save her—in this worn down dive of intercontinental transit drivers and dock workers. He’s fresh faced and young, aspiration radiating from his very bones. “What do you think the senate’s gonna do about this?”

It’s the news feed at the bottom of the screen—Earth’s _Shang Jiang_ calling an emergency session to decide their stance. They’d obviously known about Krypton’s plight before even the most capitalist earthen company—the military’s quantum entanglement communication relay decades more advanced. After two-hundred years of King of the Hill, the Chinese had ended up on top—every other influential country had lost their best and brightest to the stars in quick succession. The Chinese held fast to their roots, and their home, steering the mother planet of the Sol system away from the brink of absolute destruction.

It was still a husk of its former self—nearly uninhabitable after chemical warfare, over population and resource depletion. The only people still on Earth were the people who couldn’t _afford_ to leave—conscripted years in the military, and regulated placement into the work force the only two consistent means of leaving. What kept Earth in the eye of the galactic community was the military—the only sure way of making it into space for much of the planet was with a frictionRifle and a mission.

Earth’s _Shang Jiang_ flickers in the lower corner, an overlaying holoCast from a reporter inGreenland—the only fully domed area on Earth. She’s a hawkish woman in military uniform escorted by a squadron of Earth’s stellar marines—the Mosquitoes, a name that seemed more a lost bet than anything—men and women who would give even Krypton’s Knights pause.

  
“Nothing,” she says, eventually, because she knows it to be true. “What can children do when their parents fight?”

The slanted power within the Colonial Alignment— _Uhlzon :Fidh_ to every system outside Sol—had never been so unanimously felt. Daxam and Krypton has always been titans amongst mortals, beasts fighting in the heavens far away from worrying minds. There’d been peace talks for _centuries_ , but being unmoved runs deep in their shared blood. Humanity had been on the galactic floor for only a handful of years—twenty-four—and they’d went into the conflict with arrogance and misinformation, thinking themselves experts at all things violent and polarizing.

They couldn’t understand the difference between countries bickering—and whole solar systems warring.

“They—call the police?” The boy says with all the hesitance of someone who isn’t sure they’re even asking the right question.

“Mother’s the mayor,” she says, watching how a sharp and thin man swaggers up the dais to the arches at the front of the coliseum. “Father’s the sheriff. When power fights power, everyone else just—steps away.”

She knows Earth’s senate is picking the course of neutrality—in-fighting is a gray spot in the coalition of planets. There isn’t a mandate to pick sides, there isn’t a punishment for something that had always been a possibility, even though it was vastly ignored. Each of the two-hundred and six other planets had happily stayed out of the civil war between giants.

“You can’t think they’re just going to let this happen?”

So much is just _allowed_ to happen, so much.

“It’s happened before,” too many times before—systems going dark for a few years and emerging drastically changed. Armadas flitting through the dark with reports echoing against their hulls. It’s always been the fringes of the Federation—the wild edges where the reach of the central planets loosened and darker natures came out to play. Lawless places full of pilfered solar systems and asteroid hopping pirates.

“Not like this,” he says, like he’s trying to make her see reason—to see how _bad_ this was.

She can’t even offer a smile—her cheeks have turned to stone, her feet brittle breaking things that can’t hold her much longer. “No, not like this.”

 _Never_ like this. Pushing blonde hair behind the delicate curve of her ear she longs for the weight of armor she hasn’t worn properly in years, though the vibration of her pulseCarver against the small of her back is a cold comfort. There’s no moment to gather the scattered college textbooks and notebooks, no consideration given to the satchel of personal items on the floor.

Blue, blue eyes watch through the static as Daxam soldiers pour through the coliseum gates, their bodies clambering giants of metal and heat. Rao glinting like hellish fire off shoulder pauldrons and isoSwords—meter-long blue poured metal humming, even if she can’t hear it through the screen. “I, Kel—of the Daxam house Gand, do sentence you to death.”

She knows him—even if it’s only abstractly. Jousted his son once in a tournament five years ago—knocked him clear off his mount, and laughed as she pulled him from the ground. She’d been nothing more than a child then, playing the part of adult—and playing it poorly. Digging fingers into the nearly invulnerable skin at the inner curve of her wrist she feels for the warm metal chip graphed to her bone that connected her to the extraNet—the implant her mother had insisted she get so they could always contact her—even three thousand lightyears away.

“Any last words?” Kel au Gand asks, raising his weapon with the curved wrist of a politico—no solid bones in the man. He’d been safe in his flagship, waiting for the crumbling ruin to settle before he stepped foot on Krypton’s red soil. A leadless man with a hawkish nose and deep set eyes—Daxam’s Magnate a scheming man and tactician, the mind behind the carnage, even if his hands remained lily white.

“You might have this day,” the Sovereign says, blinking bright eyes up at him, pressing into the pulseCarver the Daxam lancer still holds against her throat. “But rest warily, Magnate, your day will come. My _sister_ will come to take it from you.”

He _laughs_.

“Why dear Sovereign, who do you think helped us?” He leans close, and it’s only her familiarity with Daxamese sounds in the heat and weight of Krypton’s red dwarf that allows her to see the next words. _And who do you think told us where your heir-apparent is?_ She feels it in her chest—like the confusion and horror of waking up one morning and the sun never rising, the sky never lightening. The dark remains, the night goes on—and there’s no light at the end of whatever this life is. No expectation for morning, no hope for tomorrow.

The blackish-red blood that is the smear on her forearm is the only reminder of the wound that she had caused—in her fist she can feel how the extranet chip crumbles, folding in on itself until there’s only a scrapped and useless trinket of metal left on the floor of some everyEarth diner in the mid-west. She watches as the news feed blacks out—bright flashes and a crackling high-pitch noise filter through, before the recorder is righted and the scene has changed. If only slightly.

A man in what had once been crisp white clothes is hauled out by the black of his hair—his body ungainly and limp, his frame leaving behind a trail of black—the red swallowed by the color of Rao’s light. It looks harsh and cruel against the white stone of the coliseum. The Daxam legate tosses the man forward. He tumbles bonelessly across the dais, leaving little smears of color in his wake until he is at the heels of the conquered Sovereign, who looks down with the pitiless gaze of a dying god.

“Look at your bondmate, Sovereign,” the magnate says, soft as a whisper—looking down at Zor au El with all the interest one might afford a bug.

There’s crackling grief and awoken fire in the bent—but not broken—ruler, it is in how fingers curl and shoulders roll, in how she tips her chin up and away. Looking at this man in the light of red that is Kryton’s setting skyline—there is no darkness on Krypton, the red dwarf sitting on the horizon, swollen and content. For only ten astroMinutes, there is darkness—the axis of the planet, the orientation of the star.

Even three thousand lightyears away, she doesn’t have to watch how the sovereign shifts and steals the pulseCarver from the Daxam lancer—doesn’t have to watch the way the ruler kills in almost a dance. Weaving in and out, lashing armored men through with absent wrath—Alura, of the Krypton house El, had been Rao’s own Knight once upon a time, when she’d been young and she and her sister brash. She’d conquered planets with righteous anger, long before she used only words and negotiation.

The first four bodies hit the ground before most humans can blink—crumbling suits of armor that are almost inanimate in appearance; clanking and writhing for a few moments before the vibrating hiss of a pulseCarver cleaves through the metal of their suits. Bodies falling in literal halves around her as she spins and stabs a praetorian through the throat before shifting and tearing through the side of his neck. Blood sizzles against the weapon’s blade, boiling away until there’s nothing left of the violence.

 _Click_.

The first shot takes the Sovereign in the shoulder, spinning her around until she catches herself on her palm—fingers splaying through the dark stain of her bondmate’s blood. Fingers black she raises them to touch her chest were the burned hole is—sluggish blood seeps out around the cauterized edges, but it isn’t enough. Getting her feet underneath her again, Alura stands—her pulseCarver still tight in her hand. One step, two steps.

The second and third shots are lower—the crack of ribs and the squelch of ruined organs has her back on her knees. The blood gurgling from between her lips drips off the end of her chin, falling to the steadily growing puddle beneath her. Her weapon spins away, clattering down two steps before it is picked up by Kel au Gand, his grip awkward and improper, but that doesn’t seem to matter. Not with Alura pressing one hand to the holes in her torso, and the other to the cold shoulder of her dead bondmate.

“I want you to die knowing there was nothing you could do to stop this,” he hisses with earnest gratification, the sinister cast of his feature in the white-blue glow of Argo City burning. Eyes luminescent with injected optics, grin wide with malicious glee. “Not for any peace of mind—no—but to know it was _your_ inability, and _your_ arrogance, that caused this.”

One step, two steps.

Three-thousand lightyears away blue eyes watch how it all ends—on a husk that used to be one of the most promising planets in the quadrant, in a diner that had radiation filters are least five months past code—she watches her home burn. The light blue cast of the holoScreen splashes color against pale faces that hadn’t seen natural light since the super volcano erupted forty years earlier—just the artificial sun lamps that were back ordered eighteen months.

“This is insane,” the boy says leaning forward, hands pressed flat under his weight, “Absolutely fucking insane.”

The feeling in her chest swells—a tightening that makes her feel each and every heartbeat as if it was her last. The taste of copper on her tongue, the static in her teeth—even the chalky supplement that had to be put in all of earth’s drinking water to make it safe. All of it was heightened until she was drowning in sensation—everything washed out and away, lines becoming blurry reminders of what they had been. Her eyes unfocusing and looking through skin and bone—through people as if they weren’t even there.

But even as she drifts away she can’t ignore the sharp crackle of the holoScreen—the tang of horror weaving its way through all of her senses. Daxam’s Magnate was talking, his words elongating and drawling, and she’ll not be able to remember any of it—it’ll take her _years_ to get the courage to watch the full broadcast again. Swallowing down bile and forcing her eyes into focus she watches—unable to turn away because that would be cowardly.

Her mother always told her to never ignore the horrible that happens—to never willingly blind herself to evil. It had been such a hard lesson as a child—fighting that urge to turn away, but she’d begun to understand in recent years. When the weight seemed heavier on her shoulders, and the expectation of life seemed to consume.

Alura au El stares down the blade with pitiless eyes, looking past it to the weak man clasping the hilt—whoever had the recorder was jostled, but when the frame steadied again the pulseCarver was through the cage of the Sovereign’s ribs. The tip of the blade perfectly clean where it stuck out from her back—the vibrating metal heating the red and boiling it away quickly. There was the sickening gurgle of dying lungs, before she was cruelty pulled off the weapon and left to slump to the ground.

There’s many kinds of silence—artificial, absolute, and _felt_. The diner’s noise thinned out until there was only the clink of plates and the sizzle of the deep fryer. She couldn’t remove herself from the present, couldn’t slick away those sounds to focus on the limp and motionless form on the holoScreen. The news caster was talking, her imagine at the corner, but no one seems to note her—no one could look away from the carnage.

The death of a dynasty.

The image freezes—wavering in and out, as the broadcast is interrupted and shut down.

The whole thing was less than five minutes.

The everyEarth news anchor appears talking about response teams and galactic aid from Earth’s capital—but what had her attention was the scrolling news stories at the bottom of the screen. A protest in New York that closed down half the city, a lift to the water rations in London—but it was the last story that had her attention. An explosion at the Sol Military College in Shang Hai—the First-Rack barracks obliterated with nothing left but rubble, and the few cadets that had made it out of the ruin? They had been gunned down by a yet unnamed man—sixty four dead, including the gunman.

The story unfolds across the screen, and the rubble of the barrack replaces the anchor’s face. “Reports are still coming in, but first responders are confident in saying this was a premeditated attack.” Her stomach sinks, her breath staggers—the familiar landscape seemingly mutated by the smoldering remains of the barracks. The fire marshals smother the flames with gelatin, before turning their efforts to finding survivors. Two soot covered cadets wring their hands behind their backs—in the shorts and shirt they typically slept in. They were members of First Battalion, the unit housed in the ruined First-Rack barrack—chatting haltingly with the reporters on scene.

“Those on the ground say First Battalion was home to many foreign military officials—one in particular coming to mind.” She knows what to expect, but watching her own face flash into prominence was startling. It was from just after she was knighted, wearing the heavy armor that came with being a Kryptonian Knight—her pulseCarver at her hip, and her mother’s hand on her shoulder. “Kara au El—heir apparent to Krypton’s royal family—is assumed dead in what appears to be a coordinated effort with events unfolding on Krypton.”

She looks young on the screen—fourteen and confident that she knew what the world had to offer. Everything had seemed simple then—she’d finish her training, spend a few years learning about the far reaches of the Kryptonian Colonial Alignment, and then spend another few years learning command from her aunt, Astra au In-Ze.

But all of that fell through the wayside in less than five minutes—sixteen, suddenly an orphan, her aunt a traitorous murderer, and she was dead.

According to the galaxy.

The diner’s door bursts open and she turns to see her Bloodguard out of breath and serious—Susan au Vasquez looked more like her human mother than she did her Kryptonian father. Short dark hair slick with sweat and dark eyes narrowing upon finding Kara at the diner’s counter. Stepping through the shuffle of working stiffs slipping on ventilation masks for the pollution of the open streets Susan stops beside her—unable to stop from placing a hand on Kara’s shoulder, as if just making sure she was actually alive.

“I couldn’t sleep,” the Kryptonian heir-apparent says, watching how the holoScreen clicks over to some local story about expanding desert boundaries. “I guess that was pretty lucky.”

“We need to get you to safety,” Vasquez says with the urgency Kara can’t feel anymore. Like all that had just died in her blood, leaving her empty and numb.

An expanding desert in her own right.

“I’m as safe as can be,” drinking weak coffee and wincing at the metallic taste of it, “didn’t you hear? I’m dead.”

“You’ll _actually_ be dead if we don’t bunker down.” Stepping closer, her Bloodguard presses into her side—warm, and safe, and present. She smells like Krypton, even if she’d only ever been there for short trips to her paternal grandparents. It was something in the blood that made Susan smell sweet—like spun sugar. It was so easy to pass for human when those around didn’t have articulate senses.

“Does it really matter?” The emptiness hurts—which just doesn’t seem _fair_.

“Kara, listen to me,” blue eyes meet dark brown, and Vasquez just barely stops herself from grabbing the young royal’s chin. “I know you’re hurting—I wish to _everything_ that you weren’t—but we need to go. Your people are going to need you.” Her people. The billions who weren’t dead and gone, who were scattered around Colonial space looking for direction.

Letting Vasquez guide her toward the door, Kara tugs on the ventilation mask around her neck—she doesn’t need it, but it’s the easiest way to play the part of human. Blinking away the tears she’d been preventing from falling, she can’t help how they tumble down her cheeks now—but it’s impossible to see them in the cloudy air of Qingdao, the foggy smoke from the refinement plants thick with proximity.

“We need to get off planet,” she says, watching a distant ship reach upper orbit. “Unnoticed.”

Vasquez squeezes her shoulder, “I know someone who can help.”

* * *

**Luna, Metropolis City. November 1 st, 2366.**

“I just think it’s pretentious, is all.” Cat says with all the tongue in cheek sarcasm afforded to someone who got away with putting their feet up on Perry White’s desk. “Who names a city _Metropolis_? Were _Megalopolis_ and _Impressiveville_ already taken?” Ten years in Metropolis and she’s still pondering the flathead that designed Luna’s biggest city—improbably high buildings and layers of traffic that would make New York City blush.

“I didn’t hire you for your wistful wonders of the moon’s gentrification,” Perry says around an electronic cigarette—the entire office smelled like the apple-cinnamon smoke and the sour taste of poorly made Korean barbeque.

“I’m just saying,” she continues, watching the tip of her shoe sway back and forth, “if it were up to me, I’d employ a bit of subtlety.”

Metropolis had been built over the span of thirty years—the only people able to afford space travel back then were fortune 500 billionaires and their hopeless, and hungry, need to be the _first_ at something. In an age where so many things had that _been there, done that_ taste to them the possibility of being the generation that colonizes the night sky was too good to pass up.

Artificial cores, magnetic poles and billions of dollars of terraforming had made the luminous surface hospitable—if a bit hard on the lungs for newcomers. Half the population—new transplants from the nearly uninhabitable Earth—had to wear the respiratory masks that allowed their lungs to acclimate. There was no better power play. Home field advantage had just been a phrase until aspiring business partners were forced into merger meetings in re-breathers and oxygen tanks.

“Well, alas, it wasn’t up to you, Grant.” Her boss sighs, leaning back in his chair so that he could appraise his best journalist. She’d been away for the better part of the last six months—a quick jaunt over to Mars on the hopes that she could get imbedded in the _Roter Teufel_ cell that was smuggling iron beyond the gas giants. She’d been doing well until she’d gotten a bounty put on her head and she’d been forced to smuggle herself out of Mars’ capital city in a transport of Martian vegetables.

Letting her feet fall back to the floor, Cat exhales harshly through her nose and leans forward, “this is a story, Perry.” She doesn’t need to elaborate on _what’s_ a story. She’s been filling his dataCore with enough tertiary evidence that he couldn’t _not_ see the writing on the metaphorical goddamned wall.

“It’s a non-story, Cat.” He insists, swiping a hand across his desk until his screen woke up and the display flashed to life between them. Cat’s face now augmented with pale blue and green frames from the holoEmitters.

“How can you possibly say that?” _Breath in, breath out_. Like regulated breathing was really going to help her keep her head. “Four different sources, Perry. _Four_. And I’m not talking bus boys and garbage men—politicos and military. _Ranked_ military.” One of whom just happened to be an old classmate who had done well for themselves in the Sol Militant—a woman who looked good with the gold emblem on her chest.

“And they’re willing to be quoted— _on the record_?”

“ _-ish_.” She declares with the kind of facial expression afforded to very heavily suspect _maybes_. “She’s willing to help me find the source. She’s not happy with the official word any more than I am.”

The official _word_ being about the Kryptonian armada that had gone missing six years prior—the largest force of any planetary system in the Colony had ever seen. It had up and vanished only days after the royal family of Krypton had been slaughtered in their own pantheon—on intergalactic television, no less. It was accepted fact that the general of the : _zuhur_ armada was the sovereign’s own twin sister, and responsible for Daxam’s insider knowledge. It had taken a few days, but eventually word got out what was said in the ten lightMinutes of darkness that had made the recording hard to discern.

“I thought you were brighter than this, Grant,” it had taken _years_ , but the edges of the story were beginning to give—crumbling just enough that Cat could see fingerprints. And she _needed_ to know who they belonged to.

“Has anyone ever found them?” She asks, “It must be a little difficult to hide half a thousand ships—you’ve seen the vids, Perry. Something that large doesn’t just _vanish_.” She’s baiting him, she knows it even if he doesn’t—it’s what has been sitting at the bottom of her stomach since she was able to connect back up to her dataCore. _I know where it is_ , sitting on a blank source with no return address—though something like this didn’t really _need_ to be claimed.

“So someone scuttled their ships, left them out in the black to rot. Is it hard to imagine traitors being traitorous?”

“This isn’t something that a little back stabbing could fix,” Cat says with all the aplomb of someone in the know— _what_ exactly she knew was up for debate. Even to herself.

“Tell that to the late sovereign, kid.”

“She has one of the ships,” Cat blurts, “Well, she knows where one is. It’s taken her a few years to track it down, but—Perry, you can’t say you believe the official story. Some general is jealous of her sister and what? Plots the death of her whole family—and then vanishes? That’s fairytale, and you know it.”

Perry wipes his hands over his face, pulling at the frayed edges of his beard with the agitation of someone who isn’t comfortable yet with sitting behind a desk. Cat knew he longed to go out and chase the stories, that he missed his heydays breaking open conspiracies—of hunting through the solar system for the _facts_. A wrinkled day old shirt and tie doesn’t seem proper for such a man—not when it’s with the backdrop of a sixty-third floor corner office.

“Where would you have to go?” He asks, dark eyes blinking.

“The Belt,” Cat has to smile when he bolts upright, that boyish glint in his eyes flashing for only a moment before he pushes it down below the responsible worry of an adult—and her employer. _The Belt_ was the ring of asteroids bisecting the system—home to every illegal trade and craft available in the known galaxy. The Sol Militant had given up their attempt to bring laws to the Belt—an impossibly dense and chaotic stretch of space that was ever changing. Homemade gravity fields, trip mines—and more than that, the sheer _number_ of ship owning criminals who loved to start the morning by shooting a frigate out of the black.

“You know we don’t work inside the Belt,” he warns, brow furrowed and lips pressed.

“We _should_. That’s where people go when they have something worth hiding.” It was just accepted fact that the Belt was a safe haven for criminals—to an extent. They policed themselves and took care of any outsiders that threatened the stability of underground ecosystem. The two body traffickers had been found in stasis pods near the Sol recruitment center near Mars—people that didn’t really mind taking people against their will to be sold into labor camps on the gas giant’s moons.

“It’s also where people who don’t mind leaving behind bodies hide.” He’s worried, and Cat can’t blame him—the Planet had tried sending journalists into the Belt before, and they’d always been returned in body bags. But they’d been green behind the ears—chasing the call of excitement into the underbelly of the system. Cat was a lot of things—negative things too—but green wasn’t one of them.

“Perry,” she hedges, leaning forward, “we go where the story takes us. It’s what we do.” No danger was too much when it came it finding the truth. It’s what made the Daily Planet one of the most well-known publications on the extraNet—from Earth all the way out to Krypton.

“It’s what we do,” he agrees, his head in his hands while inhaling deep. “HR is going to have a fucking field day with this, Grant. There’s a pool in the dark floor on when you’re going to bite off more than you can chew.” He’s going for joking, but he’s serious—it’s the worry in his eyes, and the tension in his shoulders. He’d poached her off her college newspaper—said he could spot an investigative journalist form half a system away, and she was one. “Should I put money down on any day soon?”

Smiling while kicking herself up to her feet and slapping his desk, “keep your money, Perry. No sense in losing it.” Cat knew a lot lingered between the rocks in the Belt—or _Hell_ as native born Belters liked to call it—but she wasn’t scared.

Maybe that was the problem.

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to follow me on tumblr @civilorange.


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